An Interview with Ione! [view or download pdf file]
My art reaches out from my heart, guts, body and soul to all!
Ever since I can remember I've always had a desire to communicate with every person in the world.
At first I thought I could accomplish this through travel. And so I did. I toured through India, Africa, Asia, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Europe, South and Central America, plus the more usual places in the U.S., Mexico, Caribbean and the like. I even scoured more remote areas of the world like Easter Island, the Galapagos Islands, Myanmar, Nepal, Srinigar. There is almost nothing or no one which has escaped my eye.
Throughout these countries I managed to speak with everyone I could. I've taped, recorded and photographed my conversations from inside the huts of African villages to the alleys of remote towns in China. I've shared beetle-nuts with women squatting in circles in temple areas in Algeria. Been in places where no one had ever heard of the Jewish religion. I could go on with my endless adventures...endlessly. But they did not satisfy my thirst for communication.
Then there was my performing career. I appeared on television every morning in the Chicago area for WLS-TV. My show was called "The Prize Movie With Ione." Here I chatted and connected with fellow Chicagoans five mornings a week from 8:30 to 10:30 a.m. for over seven years. The show was the highest rated television show in that time slot.
For over thirty years I performed on a variety of television and radio commercials. With an ear for mimicry, and an ability to sight-read I was a "natural" for voice-overs. I sang, and did multiple voices on all sorts of recordings in the Chicago and Midwest area. The average listener was unaware of whom I was, because doing commercials as a "voice" is anonymous, particularly when I did a huge range of voices similar to Mel Blanc. Old ladies, children, accents, dialects, impersonations, cartoon characters were in my repertoire of hundreds of voices. I was able to accomplish these voices through visual images of the characters. If I could see the person I was trying to capture, I could produce the voice or sound.
But this was not enough.
I was tired of physically performing. Tired of presenting myself in this fashion, I took this huge imagination coupled with endless driving energy, and thrust it on canvas, cast it in clay, and welded it in metal. Now I can reach out beyond the limits of my previous endeavors to touch and find love, appreciation and understanding.
